Brazil’s Bitter Presidential Race Leads to Scores of Assaults

Fernanda Villas Bôas had just cast her vote in Brazil’s presidential election on Oct. 7 and was leaving her polling station when a man grabbed her arm from behind.

The knife-wielding assailant was wearing a black T-shirt that said “Bolsonaro for president,” in reference to the former Army captain, Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right candidate who won the most votes in the first round of the bitterly divisive race.

“When my commander wins, the press will die,” she remembers him telling her during the attack in Recife, a city in the northeast. Ms. Villas Bôas, a journalist, was wearing a badge from the news website where she works.